Keep Iraqi POWs off American dole

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Will President George W. Bush allow Iraqi troops to come to America,
enjoy better welfare and health care benefits than our own soldiers, and
endanger national security?

It has happened before.

After Gulf War I, the first Bush administration and the Clinton
administration recklessly opened our borders to former Iraqi prisoners
of war-from conscripts to elite Republican Guardsmen. The resettlement
program was launched in response to pressure from the United Nations,
the Saudi government (which balked at taking in the captured soldiers),
and our own feckless State Department (which has, and always will, act
like a hostile foreign entity).

As a result, an estimated 6,000 enemy Iraqi soldiers have resettled in
the U.S. at public expense since 1993. Their welcome gifts included air
travel, Medicaid, job and language-training assistance, health care,
Supplemental Security Income (SSI), food stamps, Refugee Cash
Assistance, and other welfare and housing benefits worth about $7,000
per person. (These, of course, are just the start-up costs.)

In total, the resettlement of Gulf War I-era Iraqi POWs and their family
members in America soaked up some $70 million in taxpayer funds. No such
aid was offered to American troops and their families who sacrificed
during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

"We find it disturbing that American taxpayers must fund the travel of
former Iraqi soldiers (who took up arms against our own soldiers) to the
U.S.," noted Rep. Donald A. Manzullo (R-Ill.) in a 1993 letter to
then-President Clinton. "Ironically, we provide the [POWs] with welfare
services while asking our own veterans and service personnel to bear the
burdens of deficit reduction."

Even more outrageous: the laxity of screening procedures for these enemy
prisoners of war before they were allowed to settle across our home
front, from Florida to Michigan, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, and
California.

Advocates for the Iraqi POWs claimed that most were Shiite deserters who
had participated in the U.S.-encouraged uprising against President
Saddam Hussein; other combatants allegedly claimed they would face
religious and ethnic persecution or would be executed for helping allied
forces.

But one former State Department official and former Army
counterintelligence officer who oversaw interviews for Iraqi POWs
seeking asylum, Rob Frazier, recently told Los Angeles Weekly that
"[most] of the people he saw had no documents to verify their stories."
Saddam's sleeper agents could have easily blended into the refugee
population because "we really couldn't background a lot of these guys,
and I was getting all those reports [of sleeper agents] from inside the
[POW] camp."

Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey added: "They should have vetted everyone
in a reasonable manner before they gave them asylum. Instead, as the
saying goes, we may have left our most important work undone."

Although a bipartisan group of 75 congressional representatives opposed
the Iraqi POW resettlement in the 1990s on economic, equity, and
national security grounds, the program continued unabated. All
Washington could muster up were a pair of measly, non-binding House and
Senate resolutions objecting to this dangerous reward plan for potential
Iraqi infiltrators.

Fast forward to 2003.

The FBI is desperately seeking thousands of high-risk Iraqis who've
disappeared into the American mainstream. A recently declassified report
from the U.S. judge advocate general's office heightens concern about
Saddam's sleeper agents lurking among the Iraqi POW/refugee population.
"Few Iraqi prisoners of war [from Gulf War I] provided their real names,
ranks, or other vital information," the JAG report stated, according to
Newsweek. "Now, according to Iraqi opposition sources, Saddam has been
issuing new identity documents under different names to thousands of his
people..."

So far, we've captured more than 4,500 of Saddam's soldiers during
Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some may face U.S. military tribunals or
special courts in Iraq. Irregular paramilitaries, captured in combat
wearing civilian clothes, could be sent to Guantanamo Bay. And like
thousands before them, countless other Iraqi POWs are hoping to win
asylum in America.

We need a preemptive strike against another taxpayer-subsidized Iraqi
POW invasion: Keep them off our dole. Keep them off our soil. Send the
wretched refuse of the Iraqi military to a friendly welfare state where
they'll be assimilated by appeasers with open arms: